Google Rolls Out WebM Support in Chrome and on YouTube

If you've signed up for the HTML5 beta on YouTube, you can now try out WebM.

When Google made good on the speculation to open source the VP8 codec as part of the WebM project, they failed to mention that their own browser, Chrome, would lag behind Opera and Firefox in supporting the format. WebM support was added to Chromium, the open source version of Chrome, following Google's announcement.

WebM and VP8 have now been added to the developer channel of Chrome for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which can be found here. YouTube is currently supporting the format, as members of the HTML5 beta can now experience WebM videos.

To join the HTML5 beta, simply go to youtube.com/html5 and sign up. After you've sign up, search for a video and add "&webm=1" to the end of the URL. WebM videos in YouTube are tagged with "HTML5 - WebM" in the player bar next to the screen resolution indicator.